Justin Trudeau offers help to mayors in COVID-19 hot spots

OTTAWA – Prime Ministerhas promised help to big city mayors in Ontario and Quebec’s hot spots as rising coronavirus infections expose ongoing gaps in health care and the social safety net in the two provinces.

In Toronto, help is expected soon via a revised business aid package that Mayor John Tory said he’s been assured will be retroactive to Oct. 1, and that he hopes will be simpler and more flexible than the last round of commercial assistance and rent relief, in order to address fears expressed by many small business and restaurant owners they cannot survive a new round of closures.

In Ottawa, that federal help could come via a surge in COVID-19 testing and laboratory capacity at a federal building Trudeau is offering to make available to local public health authorities.

The federal government is already providing hundreds of federal workers to do contact tracing in Ontario, Alberta and Quebec, and agreements with other provincial governments, which are responsible for testing and contact tracing.

In several phone calls over the past three days, Trudeau spoke to mayors in Toronto, Peel Region, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City to determine their needs.

The messages from Tory and Ottawa’s Jim Watson were similar, according to the two mayors: the spike in new cases is an immediate challenge, putting a strain on testing and contact tracing in their cities, as well as on housing and shelter resources.

Tory said the pandemic has created a “huge” housing problem for Toronto, and he told Trudeau the $1 billion fund to rapidly convert buildings to support immediate isolation housing needs “was a great start” to address what is also a longer-term problem.

“We had to literally move 3,000 people into alternate accommodations because the existing shelter system didn’t allow for physical distancing,” Tory said in an interview. He also wants more support for mental health service needs, and underlined Toronto’s testing and contact tracing backlog challenges.

Watson told Trudeau the $1 billion rapid housing initiative announced last month is set to end Mar. 31 when the need for help is likely to run into summer months. He asked Trudeau to speed up a federal offer of the use of a federal building in the southern Ottawa suburb of Fallowfield with an on-site lab to expand COVID-19 testing capacity – a plan that Watson said might be finalized in the next week or two.

The mayors flagged their concerns for small businesses, especially the hospitality sector, and the strain on municipal funding as public transit costs remain high while ridership remains low.

Money from the $19-billion federal Safe Restart Agreements with provinces has begun to flow to municipalities in the past few weeks, Tory and Watson said.

Toronto has received around $600 million so far, and the second phase will require the city to apply for another $600 million. Ottawa has received about $75 million of $124.5 million it has been allocated. Both cities still face big shortfalls in their fiscal years – Ottawa’s is about $67 million, while Toronto’s could be around $300 million if it receives the $1.2 billion from the Safe Restart pool.

The mayors impressed upon Trudeau the need for future support, while thanking him for federal help to date.

“Justin Trudeau gets cities,” said Tory. Still, he said he “didn’t miss the opportunity to say we’d probably need to have something, albeit perhaps more modest, that would be called Safe Recovery 2.0 because in 2021 the pandemic will still be taking its toll.”

Tonda MacCharles is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: